artwork and other creative projects

About mz jenny lee

Wearing many hats for a living...because who wants to wear just one hat? My many and diverse interests have lead to different blogs so I can give them individual love and attention :)!
I hope you enjoy them!

Living in California means enjoying delicious citrus fruits all the year round, like navel oranges, lemons, limes, pomelo and grapefruit. In fact, all of these fruits are sorely missed by me when I’m living in Korea. Unlike California, Korea has four very distinct seasons, including some very, very cold winters–and this basically translates into a lack of good, domestically grown citrus fruit. Yet oddly enough, Mandarin oranges (aka “clementines”, “halos”, “cuties”, “tangerines”, etc…) are extremely common in Korea, especially in the winter months.

If you know anything about my beloved rescue dog, Webby, you know that she is obsessed with stuffed animals–or rather, she’s obsessed with ripping them apart. Unfortunately, the teddy bear dolls pictured above are among her victims. Their loss was all the more tragic for me because I had sewn them myself years ago when my husband (then boyfriend) and I started the long distance phase of our relationship (which lasted four years!). I made one bear for each of us, and he had “custody” of the bears while I was in the US and he stayed in Korea. Once I returned to Korea, we got married, and couple years after that I got Webby, and well, sadly the rest is history. But at least I found this old photo of my lovely bears, sitting pretty with their pal Chupi Chones, the frog. Farewell, bears!

About a year after getting married, Yoongu and I moved into a brand new apartment complex in Icheon. Unlike some older apartment complexes, which sport a very plain and totally unadorned layout, the complex we went into tried to feature some…ahem…creative (i.e. tacky) design elements. This included mismatched wallpapers, mirror tiles (a la the 1980s), plastic framing spray painted metallic gold, etc… Egads, the list of design tragedies in this apartment seemed never ending!

My mom is one talented lady–she’s an amazing cook, she has a green thumb, and she made a great deal of my clothes when I was growing up. Luckily, her interests have rubbed off on me (although the gardening one took a L-O-N-G time–in fact, my mom kept giving me cacti as presents all the way through high school because I had trouble keeping plants alive!).

I love to learn about other cultures, and living in Los Angeles has definitely given me many opportunities to do so. The Mexican holiday of Dia de muertos/dia de los muertos (Day of the Dead) is a cultural holiday I’ve been exploring more in recent years, especially after my friend, Jenna, invited me to Dia de los Muertos at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

As an adult, a night of fun is often expected to involve glasses of wine, appetizers, music, and lots of small talk. I have to admit that I often miss being a kid when pulling out a board game was the obvious choice for how to have an evening full of fun. Luckily, I’m still very much a kid at heart, and I manage to indulge my love of board games every now and then. Mancala has definitely been a favorite game, since it’s one of the few games my husband will humor me with (he is decidedly not a game person!). We’ve played countless rounds with our lizard mancala board, which is one of my favorite collaborative projects with him.

I’m a huge Wizard Oz fan, and I’m referring to the original Oz series by L. Frank Baum (although I also enjoy the countless adaptations and reboots that exist out there, like MGM’s 1939 film with Judy Garland and the Wicked series).

I think it’s unfortunate that more people aren’t aware of how big the Wizard of Oz was back in its day– it was like the Harry Potter of the early 20th century!